In Hesiod’s Works and Days, Pandora opened a jar rather than a box.
Hesiod used the ancient Greek word pithos, which referred to a large storage jar commonly used for commodities such as grain, oil, or wine. The vessel held destructive forces that escaped when Pandora opened it. The text does not call the container a small wooden box.
The familiar phrase “Pandora’s box” developed much later through translation history. The sixteenth-century humanist Erasmus translated the Greek vessel as a box in Latin, helping establish the wording that became standard in European languages.
The distinction matters because the jar is part of the earliest surviving version of the myth. Artistic and popular retellings usually retain the word “box,” even when they otherwise follow Hesiod’s story.